Cecelia Ahern - The Year I Met You

‘Come on, Matt.’

You follow me across the road. You finally smile when you see what I’m doing and you join in, eagerly. We spend ten minutes quietly draping toilet roll all over Corporate Man’s garden, laughing so hard we almost pee ourselves, and have to stop for breaks, clamping our hands over each other’s mouths so we don’t make too much noise and wake him. We weave it around the branches of his chestnut tree and leave pieces hanging down like it’s a weeping willow. We decorate the flower beds with it, we try to tie a great big bow around his BMW. We wrap it around the pillar on his front porch and then we break little bits up like confetti and sprinkle the grass. When we’re finished, we high-five each other and turn around to find Monday and Dr J watching us. Monday is barefoot, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, looking hot and slightly amused but trying not to. Dr Jameson is wearing his emergency go-to outfit – shell suit and shiny shoes – and looking genuinely concerned for our welfare.

‘He’s drunk, but I don’t know what your excuse is,’ Monday says, arms folded across his chest. ‘Seriously, you two really need to get jobs.’

‘I hope to start on Monday, Monday,’ you say, then chuckle at your wit. You look down at his bare feet. ‘Ah, so you’re into this too.’

‘Into what?’

‘Jasmine’s little trick. I saw her do it once. In the middle of the night. Crying. In winter, like the crazy bitch she is.’

Monday laughs.

‘I knew it!’ I exclaim. ‘I knew you were watching me. But I wasn’t crying that night.’

‘No, that was the night you made it look like your house had vomited grass on your garden.’

I can’t help it, I have to laugh, but we are too loud and so Monday and Dr J guide us away from Corporate Man’s house so he won’t wake up and see how we’ve decorated his garden.

Ignoring Dr Jameson’s advice to keep your shoes on, you walk ahead of us, kicking off your leather shoes and throwing your stinky socks in my direction. You decide to be rooted to the earth, grounding yourself, but doing an unusual hippy kind of dance which makes us all laugh whether we like it or not. It is quite amusing until you step on the piece of broken bottle that you fired across the road.

Dr Jameson goes running to help.

Autumn

The season between summer and winter, comprising in the Northern Hemisphere usually the months of September, October and November.

A period of maturity.

27

Monday, you and I sit in a row on a couch, eating Stroopwafels, in Dr J’s immaculately kept living room that smells like basil and lemons due to the row of basil plants lining the windowsill and the lemon tree in the corner catching the sun. The dog lies in the sun lazily looking at us with bored eyes. This is not the first time we have all been here, in fact it is the third Saturday in a row that we have been present in his interviews for companionship for Christmas Day.

We haven’t been so cruel as to not invite him ourselves. You were the first to ask him, albeit because you are trying to earn brownie points from Amy who is still holding out on you, waiting for a sign that you are making an effort, that you are a changed man, that you have indeed got your act together. This note she wrote, incidentally, instead of disheartening you as I thought it would do, actually gave you hope. Apparently it is a note that she’d written a few times before in stages of your life together, one being when you tried to propose to her three times but chickened out. You see her note as an intervention, a kind of a circle of support for your marriage. You read between the sparse lines that there’s a hidden clue meaning she will in fact come back to you, but it is August and there is still no great communication between you. You thought she would think of the Dr Jameson invitation as proof of how you have changed, instead she saw your kindness as thoughtlessness, the failure to put your family first as per usual, always thinking about your own needs, a sign that you didn’t want to be with her for Christmas Day. She had a fine list of things to say, I heard her shouting it at you one night, another night when Corporate Man knew better than to complain. I’m sure Dr Jameson heard too, which made your offer all the easier, and awkward, to turn down. For his closest friend and neighbour on the street not to be able to invite him to dinner on Christmas Day must have been a further blow to him and I see that he looks older all of a sudden, more tired, though he is trying to appear as though he is enjoying it all.

‘At least she’s talking to him,’ Monday had said as we’d both lain awake in bed listening to you argue outside at the garden table, thinking in our new early relationship smugness that we could never possibly speak to each other like that.

But it was bad timing when you’d broached the subject, your antics at the radio awards had hit the news again and you had scuppered any chance for a big job that you’d been hoping for on the few rival stations that would consider you. You are too much of a risk. Instead of what you’d been hoping for, you’d been offered a job on a lesser known local radio station, transmitting in Dublin only, but at least it’s your own show, The Matt Marshall Show noon to three p.m. talking about issues of the day. You will have to be on your best behaviour. You started two weeks ago, and you have kindly arranged for Heather to work in your office one day every week, something we discussed when you attended Heather’s circle of support. The new show means you have taken an enormous pay cut and don’t have the same team around you that you once had, so you’ve gone back to basics and Amy is going back to work, but I think despite being pushed into it, the change will be good for both of you. I would know.

I have tuned right out of what the young woman before me is saying. To say she is a New Age hippy would be rude and dismissive, but she is currently living in a tree trying to stop developers demolishing it because it’s the habitat of a rare breed of snail. I admire her strong beliefs: the snails need people like her to protect them from people like me, but in doing so she’s preventing the developers from getting on with a badly needed new children’s hospital. I wish people would fight as hard for the children as they would the snails. I don’t think Dr Jameson is as empathetic about the snails as she hopes he’d be: they ate the lettuce on his garden plot. This is not why I can’t concentrate, it is Monday next to me, so close I can feel the heat through his T-shirt which is soft and thin and almost see-through. I glance down and to the left and spy nipple. He catches me and gives me a look that I know well now, full of longing, and I think what a waste to waste it. He rubs the palm of my hand with his thumb, just once, then back again and that’s enough. I want him. He looks at me, as if he wants me now, here. I almost would if I didn’t think you’d commentate throughout the entire event.

It’s September and it’s muggy outside, heavy, as though we’re about to have a thunderstorm; headache-inducing weather, the kind that drives animals – and you – crazy. I hope it rains because my garden needs watering. Across the road, Mr Malone sits alone in the garden chair, a cup of tea in his hands that’s been there for the past hour. If he didn’t occasionally blink I would think that he’s dead, but he’s like that most days since Mrs Malone died, a second stroke taking her life three weeks ago. I picture her weeding in the garden, on her hands and knees in her tweed skirt, then I picture her how she was after the stroke, sitting in the garden with Mr Malone reading to her, and now I see nothing, just him alone and it makes my eyes fill.